Real phone support, at any hour
You can ring a human in the middle of the night. We cannot match that, and if it matters to you it is a legitimate reason to stay.
GoDaddy alternative
A GoDaddy alternative for people who just want hosting
GoDaddy is very good at being enormous. It is a public company on the New York Stock Exchange with a product for almost everything, which is useful right up until the point you only wanted one of them.
The case
A shorter checkout and a smaller catalogue
The most common thing we hear about GoDaddy has nothing to do with reliability. It is the experience of buying: a checkout that keeps offering things, a renewal cycle that keeps offering more, and an account area with a great deal in it that you never asked for. That is a deliberate strategy and it plainly works, because GoDaddy is listed in the S&P 500. It is just tiring if all you needed was somewhere to put a website.
We sell three shared plans. That is the entire shared catalogue. There is no upsell at checkout, no add-on that turns out to be necessary later, and the renewal price is printed next to the first-year price on the card before you buy anything.
There is a structural point underneath this too. A public company answers to shareholders every quarter, and that pressure eventually reaches pricing and support staffing. It is nobody's villainy, it is just how the incentive runs. We answer to customers, because there is nobody else to answer to — the company has had one owner since 2000.
Worth knowing if you are weighing longevity: GoDaddy bought Media Temple in 2013, a host with a genuinely devoted following, and has since retired the brand and migrated its customers onto GoDaddy. Nothing improper about it. It is simply what happens, and it is the outcome we have spent twenty-six years not having.
Being fair
What GoDaddy does well
If one of these is what you need, stay where you are. We would rather say that than sell you a move you will regret.
The biggest registrar there is
For domains specifically, the range and tooling are hard to beat. We only register domains alongside hosting, so for a large standalone portfolio they are the better fit.
A product for everything
Email, commerce, marketing, payments, site builders. If you want it all on one bill, that is a genuine convenience we do not offer.
Moving
What leaving GoDaddy actually involves
Less than people expect, and we do the awkward parts.
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Send us the domain
That is usually enough for us to see what you are running and where. We look before quoting, and migration is a flat $299 however many sites are involved. If moving will not fix your problem, we will say so and you can stop there.
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We build it alongside your live site
Nothing is switched off. We copy the files, the databases and the email, then test the whole thing on a temporary address while your current site carries on serving visitors.
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You look at it, then we cut over
Only once you are happy. DNS changes take a few hours to reach everyone, and your old account stays up throughout, so there is no window where nothing works.
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You cancel the old one
On your schedule, not ours, once you are satisfied nothing was missed. We would rather you kept it a fortnight than felt rushed out of it.
Your domain can stay where it is registered. Moving hosting does not require moving the domain, and we will not push you to.
Hosting plans
Our plans, with the renewal price on the card
Three shared plans and no fourth one hiding behind an upsell. First year from $5 a month, and the year-two rate is printed beside it.
Questions
Questions about moving from GoDaddy
Yes, and plenty of people do. You change the nameservers at GoDaddy to point at us and nothing else has to move. We will send you the two values and can talk you through where they go.
Only alongside hosting — we do not sell or transfer in standalone domains. If you want everything in one place and your domain is already at GoDaddy, leaving it there is usually the simplest answer.
Standard WordPress, Joomla and plain HTML sites move without drama. Sites built in GoDaddy's own website builder are the exception — those are tied to their platform and generally cannot be exported, so they have to be rebuilt. We will tell you which situation you are in before you pay anything.
If you are on Microsoft 365 through GoDaddy, that is a separate product and can carry on unchanged. If your email is part of the hosting account, we will recreate the mailboxes here before cutover so nothing is lost in the gap.
Also worth reading
Comparing more than one?
Leaving Bluehost?
How we compare, what Bluehost genuinely does better, and what moving involves.
Leaving HostGator?
How we compare, what HostGator genuinely does better, and what moving involves.
Who owns your web host?
A sourced table of which hosting brands share an owner, and what consolidation actually changes for customers.
Not sure it is worth moving?
Send us your domain. We will tell you what you are running, what it is likely to cost you at renewal, and whether we would actually be an improvement. Sometimes the honest answer is to stay.